The picture given in Napier's journal is one that would have been worth painting, so full of contrast was it, so deep-set in history. "There was our pretty young Queen receiving our homage, and our old shrivelled bodies and gray heads were bowed before her throne, intimating our resolution to stand by it as we had stood when it was less amiably filled. I wonder what she thought of us old soldiers! We must have appeared to her like wild beasts. Lord Hill is old and has lost his teeth, poor Sir John Jones looked like a ghost, and Sir Alexander Dickson is evidently breaking. Thinking how these men had directed the British thunders of war I saw that death was the master. The brilliance of the Court vanished, and the grim spectre stared me in the face. His empire is creeping over all!"
During the summer of 1839 the Chartist agitation went on, and more than once England was on the verge of actual rebellion. Napier's position was a very peculiar one. Thoroughly in sympathy with the people in the objects they had in view, but sternly opposed to any attempt to obtain these objects by force, he ran the danger of falling between the two stools of opinion and duty. He was at this time sailing upon a very dangerous sea, and a single false movement might have involved England in bloodshed. In his letters and reports to his civil and military superiors we find the line ever distinctly drawn between the immediate repression of disorder, which he can answer for at any moment, and the permanent remedy for the evil, which must be the work of the Government. To the military authorities these expressions of opinion on the part of their subordinate appear utterly unprecedented. Napier has told the Commander-in-Chief that he can see no way to meet the evils but to concede to the people their just rights, while the principle of order is at the same time vigorously upheld. The answer to this is suggestive of many thoughts. "Lord Hill desires me to point out your observation and to suggest that you avoid all remarks having allusion to political questions; and I am to say, without entering into the merits of the question, that neither he, as Commander-in-Chief, nor you, as the Major-General commanding the Northern District, can have anything to do with the matter; it is therefore better that you should confine yourselves to what is strictly your provinces as military men." And there is another fact revealed to us in the pages of Napier's correspondence at this time which must strike the reader of to-day as strange. It is told in his account of a public dinner to which he was invited in September, 1839. He had accepted the invitation, thinking it would not be a party demonstration; but he soon found he was mistaken. All the great ones of the county were assembled, with the Lord-Lieutenant in the chair. "Church and State" was the first toast, and it was received with rapturous approval. Then, in the second place, came the health of the Queen. "Glasses were filled," writes Napier, "but not a sound of applause followed. Her Majesty's health was drunk in significant silence. No man cried 'God bless her' except myself. Then came 'The Queen Dowager [the widow of William the Fourth] and the rest of the royal family.' Instantly the room shook with shouts of applause." "You are in the wrong box, General," whispered Napier's right-hand neighbour, one of the members for the county. "So it seems, my lord," answers the irate soldier; "and the reigning Queen is in it too." How strangely this episode reads to-day; yet at the time it was common enough in the ranks of the Tory party. It was only a few years earlier that a widespread conspiracy was afloat among the men who called themselves the True Blues of their party to shut out the Princess Victoria from the throne and substitute the Duke of Cumberland for the succession. How far this conspiracy extended will not perhaps be fully known in our day; but in point of absolute loyalty to the person of the sovereign it is probable that the "rebel" Chartists at the time had a good deal more of it than had some of the supporters of Church and State who were so anxious to shoot them down.
Placed thus between the devil of the classes and the deep sea of the masses it is easy to surmise that Napier had no pleasant berth in this his first command as a general officer. Frequently we find him regretting his refusal of the Australian appointment two years earlier, and picturing to himself a land where men worked in the open air instead of in collieries or factories, a land where taxes were light and people were contented, and the grades of life were not marked by terrible extremes. Here are a few thoughts from his journal, worth in their plain truth and honest judgment many tons weight of the rubbish which the political economists of that time and since have poured forth to the world. "I was mad," he writes in August, 1839, "not to go out as governor of Australia. I could have founded there a great kingdom, with a systematic education, annual parliaments, and the abolition of the law of primogeniture as regards land. I would have so ruled Australia that the land should never have been thus collected." Then he goes on to the question of what constitutes the true prosperity of a nation. "Men," he writes, "are restless and discontented with poverty in manufacturing places. They have all its sufferings and have not those pleasures which make people content under it, that is, health, enjoyment of country life, fresh air, and interest in the seasons and in the various products of nature. The exhausted, unhealthy manufacturer has no such enjoyment; he has no resources but gin, gambling, and all kinds of debauchery. The countryman worships God, the manufacturer worships gold, and thus the practice of sin united to mammon-worship makes the ruffian. Yet such is the system which your political economists call the prosperity of the nation. Hell may be paved with good intentions, but it is assuredly hung with Manchester cottons." As the year 1839 drew to a close, the starvation and misery seemed to deepen over the northern command. In November we read, "The streets of this town [Manchester] are horrible. The poor starving people go about in twenties and forties begging, but without the least insolence; and yet some rich villains and some foolish women choose to say they try to extort charity. It is a lie, an infernal lie; neither more nor less. Nothing can exceed the good behaviour of these poor people, except it be their cruel sufferings." Hard as had been his nine long years of inaction, and welcome as work was to his brain and hand hungry for toil, Napier loathes the employment which carries with it the danger of having to take the lives of his fellow-countrymen. On January 16th, 1840, we find him writing the following entry in his journal: "Anniversary of the battle of Corunna. Oh, that I should have outlived that day to be at war with my own countrymen! Better be dead than live to see a civil war!" In the summer of 1841 a rumour reaches him that he is soon to be offered an Indian command. The old fighting spirit kindles at once in his heart. It will be a pleasant change to the Indus, on the very threshold of the Afghan country where war is raging, from this northern district, where his command is "slavery under noodles." "Gladly shall I get away," he writes, "from this district; for how to deal with violence produced by starvation, by folly, by villainy, and even by a wish to do right, is a hard matter. A man is easily reconciled to act against misled people if he has an honest plan of his own; but if he is only a servant of greater knaves than those he opposes, and feels he is giving strength to injustice, he loses the right stimulus to action."
CHAPTER VIII INDIA—THE WAR IN SCINDE
When Sir Charles Napier set out for India in the autumn of 1841 he was, in the ordinary sense of the word, an old man. He was sixty years of age. More than forty years earlier he had begun his military career. Thirty-two years had passed since he had fought at Corunna; and since then what a life of action had been his! And yet this little thin figure, with eagle eye and beaked nose, and long hair streaked with white, which for more than forty years seemed to have been a volcano ever in action, had not yet spent the vast stock of vital energy which it started with. Very far from it. After all his wounds and wanderings, his shipwrecks and disasters, his sorrows and sicknesses, his blows and buffetings, here he was starting out for India, far more full of energy than ten out of a dozen ensigns going out from college to begin life.
On December 13th, 1841, Napier first set foot in India. He had come out by the overland route in two months, and looked upon the journey as a marvel of rapidity. It had cost him very dear; and when he landed in Bombay he had exactly two pounds in his pocket, and his bank-account was nil. "Had I then died," he writes, "there was not a farthing left for my children," and he was sixty years of age!
When Napier assumed command of the Poonah Division in the end of 1841, our dominion in India had entered upon a very critical stage of its history. Two years before this date we had sent an army into Afghanistan, ostensibly to seat a rival Ameer on the throne of Cabul—in reality to gain a footing in that mountain land. It was an Asiatic copy of Napoleon's invasion of Spain; and although the Afghans had no outside power to help them, the result was much the same as it had been in the Peninsula. There was at first an apparently easy conquest of the country, then a rising of the people, a retreat and surrender of the invaders, followed by fresh invasions carried on with the savage accessories usual where conquest endeavours to legalise its position by calling a people who are rightly struggling in the cause of their freedom "rebels." At this particular moment—the mid-winter of 1841—a great disaster had befallen our arms. The garrison of Cabul, retreating from that place towards the Kyber Pass, had been annihilated in the defiles of Jugdulluck; the general, a few officers, and their wives having alone been saved by surrender. The two civil organisers of the invasion, M'Naughten and Burnes, had been killed, one in Cabul, the other at a conference with Akbar Khan. Sale still held Jellalabad with an Irish battalion; but the Kyber Pass was between him and India, and that defile was in possession of the Afghans. On the western side of Afghanistan our army held Ghuznee, Candahar, and Quetta; but again the Bolan Pass lay between our forces and Upper Scinde, where a small British army was cantoned on the Indus. When the news of these disasters, always magnified by native rumour, reached the countries which still intervened between our real Indian frontier and Afghanistan—Scinde and the Punjaub—signs of ill-concealed satisfaction began to manifest themselves among the princes and peoples of these still semi-independent States. This Afghan expedition had indeed been a wild and foolish venture, and the first blast of misfortune showed at once the full length and breadth of its absurdity. As each succeeding mail from the northern frontier brought to Bombay some fresh development of this critical situation, Napier bent his mind to master the complicated position of affairs; for daily it became more clear to his practised eye that the forces available on the Indian frontier were not adequate to retrieve the military situation, and that sooner or later he would be sent to the theatre of operations. When the crisis becomes really acute, favouritism lowers its front, and genius sees the road clear for action.